Practical Manual of.Beekeeping 2008 Ebook Free Download
A Practical Manual of
BEEKEEPING
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A Practical Manual of
BEEKEEPING
How to keep bees and develop your full potential as an apiarist Published by How To Content, A division of How To Books Ltd, Spring Hill House, Spring Hill Road, Begbroke, Oxford OX5 1RX, United Kingdom. Tel: (01865) 375794, Fax: (01865) 379162 [email protected] www.howtobooks.co.uk How To Books greatly reduce the carbon footprint of their books by sourcing their typesetting and printing in the UK. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or stored in an information
Contents
vi | A P R AC T I C A L M A N UA L O F B E E K E E P I N G
CO N T E N TS | vii
viii | A P R AC T I C A L M A N UA L O F B E E K E E P I N G
Illustrations
1 The inhabitants of the hive
10
2 Bee development
11
3 A worker bee’s age-related tasks in the colony
16
4 Waggle-dance communication
19 The Feminine Monarchie 5 by Charles Butler
24
6 The basic Langstroth hive
46
7 A stainless-steel mesh floor
47
8 A plastic queen excluder
48
9 Keeping frames apart
51
10 A frame feeder out of the hive
53
11 A feeder slotted into the hive on the right
53
12 Foundation wax
54
13 Wax cells
54
14 Two types of hive tool
61
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25 (a) Cut comb in a container; (b) a round section 134
Tables
7 The International Marking Code 233
6 Temperatures and timings to kill yeasts in sugar syrup 171
5 Queen/brood-nest troubleshooting guide 153
4 The causes of, and remedies for, aggressiveness 142
3 Time for 30 mg/kg of HMF to accumulate 130
2 Moisture content and honey’s liability to ferment 128
84
1 Observations of the hive’s entrance
36 A steam extractor 261
26 Sacbrood larvae: typical position 187
35 A solar extractor 260
34 A pollen-moisture meter 258
33 A pollen drier heated by an element 257
32 A bottom-mounted trap removable from the side 256
31 The number of chromosomes in bees 241
30 A plastic queen catcher and a marking pen 234
29 The Miller frame: trimmed foundation 226
28 Cell bars with plastic cells hanging downwards 220
27 A chemical treatment for varroa and an organic treatment 202
8 Number of hives per hectare for a selection of crops 251
(between pages 144 and 145)
1 One egg at the base of each cell
2 Healthy sealed brood
3 Small, isolated drone cells – a sign of laying workers
4 Multiple eggs per cell, laid part way down the cells
5 Queen introduction and travel cages, with two virgin cells at the front
6 Placing a new queen into a hive in a frame wrapped in newspaper
7 A lesser wax moth
8 Wax moth damage
9 Spotted brood pattern (pepperpot)
10 AFB: the telltale rope of a dead larva
11 Varroa destructor
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Many readers will ask themselves whether another book on beekeeping can really add anything new to the beekeeping scene. The answer to this question is yes. Although much contained in this book may be known already, information about beekeeping is spread throughout many manuals, specialist books and scientific papers that, even though interesting to search out and read, are not readily accessible to those beginning in beekeeping. This book’s aims, therefore, are to gather this knowledge together, to ensure it is presented practically and free from myths, to add to it my wide experience of beekeeping in various parts of the world and to show that anyone can learn how to keep bees, at whatever level they wish. Beekeepers vary from those who aspire to be hobbyists, who simply enjoy a fascinating pastime; to jobbing beekeepers, moving from hemisphere to hemisphere; managers
xiv | A P R AC T I C A L M A N UA L O F B E E K E E P I N G
This book will help you to start and continue to be a beekeeper. It offers advice in a very practical manner, with step-by-step guidance at each stage of the way. The advice and information it contains are based on general beekeeping knowledge, my own experiences, my successes in beekeeping and, more importantly, my frequent early failings. No book on beekeeping can cover everything about such a vast subject, and so a decision was taken to steer the reader towards the practical rather than the theoretical side of the subject. It is hoped that, by doing so, this book should help to get you started. You can pick up the more theoretical aspects from specialist books and beekeeping journals and papers – the important thing now is to begin to explore the exciting world of beekeeping.
In writing this book, I gratefully acknowledge two important occurrences; firstly, the unusual birthday present of a swarm of bees in a duvet cover given to me by my wife 18 years ago which started me out on the utterly fascinating route to being a beekeeper; and secondly, 18 years of valuable input from the global community of beekeepers which saved me from the ditch many times and convinced me beyond all doubt that beekeeping really is the finest of professions.
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Chapter 1 Honey-bees and human beings UNDERSTANDING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BEES AND POLLINATION You have just started to read a book about how to enter an exciting, multi-billion pound/
dollar, global industry that is not only of vital and strategic interest to governments but is also one that can offer you a fascinating hobby or career that could make you money and take you all over the world. The honey-bee is one of our best known insects, whose relationship with humans can be traced back to the dawn of humankind when early people ‘stole’ honey from wild bee nests. Cave paintings in Spain from as long ago as 6000 bc show our ancestors taking honey from bees, which surely indicates that beekeeping is at least as old as the other two oldest professions!
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Bees pollinate plants so that plants can reproduce, and that really is the bottom line. That is what bees are all about. That is why we need bees and that is why hundreds of millions of dollars, pounds and euros are spent annually by governments around the globe in protecting bees, in bee research and in beekeeping subsidies of one type or another.
Because of their pollinating activities, honey-bees are the most economically important insects on earth, and certainly the most studied. Honey production is essentially a side issue. The honey-bee’s role – and thus the beekeeper’s role – in this becomes more important and valuable by the day as our farming and other practices dramatically eradicate the habitats of other types of bees and pollinating insects. Some insects can exist only by eating the pollen of certain plants. If those plants were removed so that more crops could be planted, bees and other pollinating insects would die out. What, then, would pollinate our huge areas of mono-crops? The answer would be to truck in honey-bees by the million. Pollination can be achieved only by using large numbers of honey-bees. In this way, our crops and wildflowers are pollinated, and the beekeeper can obtain a pollination fee and honey for sale. As a reward for pollination, and as an enticement to the bee, most plants offer food – nectar – in return. The bees take this, alter it through the addition of enzymes, reduce its moisture content and store it as honey so that they and their colony may survive winter periods or other periods of dearth. In this way they differ from wasps, bumble-bees and other types of bee, whose colonies die out on the approach of winter, with only the newly mated queens hibernating until the spring when they will
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go and get it, the flowers will die at the end of the season and all those tons of honey will go to waste. All that money will simply have dried up in front of your eyes. If, on the other hand, you have bees, they will go and get it for you for free, and you can then either eat it or sell it or both.
Bees are probably the only livestock that use other people’s land without permission
- – and those landowners welcome them. It is a win-win situation for the bee and for everyone else. Your bees are happy carrying out their work; you can enjoy your hobby or business, and if you want to you can make a profit; the farmers get their crops pollinated and so they make a profit; the shops obtain food to sell and they make a profit; the general public have food to eat; and the government is happy that its agricultural and environmental sectors are running smoothly and that somewhere along the line they will be able to raise some tax.
Bees and the economy
Don’t forget that governments regard the whole set-up as so important that they are willing to spend millions on ensuring that the status quo does not change and that nothing happens to harm it. Recent research in the USA has valued crops that require pollination by honey-bees at an estimated $24 billion annually, and the value of commercial bee pollination on contracts at around $10 billion annually. These are huge figures by any standard and they show that bees are big business.
Using honey in medicine Honey sale value, on the other hand, is much less, at $285 million annually in the USA.
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But bees sting, don’t they? And that hurts, doesn’t it? Other than producing honey, bees are best known for their tendency to sting on sight. In fact, it is not in a bee’s interest to sting for the sake of it because they die in the process and they will avoid doing so unless in defence of their nest, which of course is why beekeepers are stung. All beekeepers will be stung during their beekeeping careers. This is a fact and it is also a fact that it is painful. But it is not very painful and the pain doesn’t last for long.
Bee sting ‘cures’ rely on this fact. By the time you apply the patented bee-sting cure bought from the snake oil stall at the market (which, technically, can’t cure anything unless it’s an anaesthetic), the pain would be just about to disappear anyway. Most beekeepers will tell you that bee stings are more or less of no concern to them and that, if you are well clothed and use calm bees, stings will be few and far between. For a very few, however, there is a danger. Allergy to insect venom does exist and can be fatal if the person stung goes into anaphylactic shock. This is extremely rare, however, and one statistic indicates that you are more likely to die from a horse falling on you than from a bee sting. Because there is a very remote possibility of suffering a fatal allergic reaction, many beekeepers carry with them an epi-pen injector for emergency use. This requires a prescription in most countries.
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have bees, and the national agricultural sector and the countryside commissions rely totally on these bees. The fewer the commercial beekeepers there are, the more hobbyists are needed to keep these vital sectors going.
Honey-bees are not domestic animals. They are wild and, unlike horses and cows and other livestock, they don’t recognize beekeepers as their ‘owners’. Having said that, recent research has shown that, despite the small size of its brain, a bee can recognize human faces if trained to do so and can remember them for two days. Scientists hope that, by studying this amazing ability further, they will be able to develop better face- recognition computer software. It is unlikely, however, that the average beekeeper will find their bees flocking to them on sight. Bees (like other insects) are assumed to act on instinct alone. However, they can also ‘learn’ – and not only learn a primary task but they can also learn and remember a secondary task resulting from the first. Like most other life forms, their daily life involves family (colony) survival and the propagation of their species.
To accomplish this, bees manufacture wax as a building material and honey as an energy
6 | A P R AC T I C A L M A N UA L O F B E E K E E P I N G Honey-bees can navigate using the position of the sun, polarized light and landmarks.
They can ‘tell’ other bees about the distance and bearing to sources of food using a well developed symbolic language based on movement and sound. They can also regulate the temperature of the nest to an exact degree using heating and cooling systems of immense complexity. As long as it has water and food, a colony placed on the sides of a volcano or iceberg will maintain its brood nest at 34º C (93º F). It is these facets of the honey-bee’s ability that have caused it to be one of the most researched insects on earth, and all countries maintain at least one institute devoted to bee research, and many universities have bee research departments.
So, could you manage to keep these highly complex creatures? The answer is yes, you could – if you knew how to, and that can be learnt from this book. It is not difficult at all, as long as you know what you are doing.
A beekeeper, then, is someone who is not only engaged in a hobby or business but also someone who (by design or not) is taking an active part in protecting the future of the planet. This sounds dramatic but in fact is true, as you will find out if you continue.
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Hobby beekeepers usually increase the number of beehives they keep, and some may expand their activity into selling part of their honey crop at local markets and in shops. Most will join their local beekeeping associations that, in some countries such as the UK, are very social institutions holding shows, dinners and drinks parties, lectures and advice sessions, and some of the most cut-throat competitions where skulduggery reigns supreme (they would never admit to this, though).
Specializing Most commercial beekeepers who make their living from bees started out as hobbyists.
Some specialize in honey production, others in pollination services to farmers; others specialize in rearing queen bees for sale; and yet others specialize in other hive products, such as beeswax, pollen, propolis or royal jelly. There is even a large and profitable market in bee venom. Some graduate into apitherapy – a very effective alternative type of healing that is fast becoming mainstream medicine. Mead, honey or propolis soap, face creams and so on are all side-lines for the imaginative beekeeper.
Other beekeepers devote their efforts to breeding the ‘perfect’ bee: a calm, gentle, disease-resistant, productive creature. Despite the fact that a male bee or drone has no father (which complicates the issue), breeding success is often claimed to be at hand. And then there are the professional itinerant beekeepers who make a living by hiring themselves out to large commercial outfits all over the world. These young men and women travel the world moving from one hemisphere to the other according to the seasons, using their beekeeping skills to pick up the many jobs available in commercial beekeeping.
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another similar firm employed Bulgarians and Peruvians. At the end of the season, most of them moved on to the Northern Hemisphere. But they would be back. And when on a night out, these young men tell the pretty young woman in the local pub that they are beekeepers, that young lady always wants to find out more (or the other way round, of course)!
Destressing yourself
You can even adopt a Zen approach to beekeeping – go with the seasons and be part of nature. Remember that bees are probably the most ‘natural’ of all humanity’s livestock. They are totally wild creatures. There is nothing domesticated about them at all, and so nature and the seasons mean everything to them – and to you, if you follow them. All the clues to success with this approach are in front of you. Finally, while still on the subject of beekeepers, I know of two very highly placed executives who each have two hives and who just like to destress themselves after a busy week in the office by sitting in the sun with a glass of wine and watching the bees coming and going from the hives. They leave all the honey to the bees and carry out only minimal essential tasks to ensure their bees’ survival. What more could you ask for?
So what type of beekeeper will you be? There is a huge choice but, whatever you choose to do, you will need some essential instruction and guidance, and it is the aim
A single honey-bee cannot live for very long on its own. There would be no point in doing so. A worker bee cannot reproduce; a queen bee cannot construct comb, collect food or even feed herself; and a drone bee is able to accomplish only one task and that is to mate. All three castes of honey-bee that live in a colony of bees – the queen, the worker and the drone – therefore can live only as part of a colony. The colony is in effect the organism, with the individual bees acting as the cells that make up that organism. In order to keep bees successfully, the beekeeper has to understand that organism: how and why it works and what it needs for its survival. Only then can the beekeeper work with bees, adapting his or her requirements to theirs. You can’t direct bees, but you can encourage them to work your way – to a certain extent.
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book with clearly drawn diagrams. First, however, you should gain an understanding of the development of the three inhabitants of the hive – the queen, the worker and the drone (see Figure 1).
(a) (c) (b) Fig. 1. The inhabitants of the hive: (a) worker, (b) queen and (c) drone.
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3
8
16 Days Queen
3
8
21 Days
Worker 3 9½
24 Days
Drone Egg Uncapped larva Capped larva
Bee development Fig. 2.
Figure 2 shows this development and how long it takes. While it is important to remember the timings of this development, which we look at in more detail in later chapters of this book, the following are some notes about what each type of bee does
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Workers: this is a complex subject we can only touch on here. A worker’s lifespan will vary according to the time of year. During the summer, the average life span is 15–38 days; during the winter it can be 140 days or more. This depends very much on the prevailing conditions.
Note: the number of days until emergence can vary considerably (e.g. for a queen, 14–17
days; for a worker, 16–24 days; and for a drone, 20–28 days). This variability may be due to environmental factors (especially temperature) and nutrition.
There is generally one queen bee in any colony. The queen is a complete female in that she can mate and lay eggs, and those, essentially, are her only tasks in life – to mate and lay eggs. She isn’t much bigger than a worker, especially before she has mated, and, in a very populous hive, can be difficult to find but, with experience, most beekeepers can find her easily enough. Finding the queen is an important part of beekeeping management, and tips on queen-finding are given in Chapter 6.
On emergence from her cell as an adult virgin, the queen mates within a few days. With worker bee encouragement she leaves the hive and flies some distance to what is known as a drone congregation area (DCA), where she mates on the wing with up to 20–30 drone bees, but usually fewer. Her pheromones attract the waiting drones which, one after another, fly up to her, grasp her from behind, evert their internal genitals and
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DCAs are mysterious affairs, and much scientific research has gone into trying to find out why they are where they are and exactly what their boundaries are. There is a DCA over Selborne Common in Hampshire that was first described by the Rev. Gilbert White in the 1700s. It still reappears in the same place each year and can easily be heard on a fine summer’s day. In these DCAs, drones mate with a queen. If they pass an invisible boundary inches away, they won’t. Why not? How do drones, which are new each year, know where they are? How do virgin queens know where they are? This is a subject ripe for further investigation, the results of which would aid commercial beekeepers immensely, and this is another opportunity for those interested in beekeeping – research on the subject. Why not combine your hobby with a career as a scientist?
Participating in multiple sex
Research has shown that worker bees back in the colony will pay more attention to a queen that has mated with a large number of drones than to one that has mated with fewer, and that they will more readily accept her. The multiple-mated queen and the queen mated fewer times have been found to have pheromonal differences, behavioural differences and queen/worker interaction differences. In other words, the more matings the better. If a beekeeper is introducing an expensively purchased queen to a colony, this is an important matter, and scientists therefore hope to devise a test so that beekeepers can know the quality of the queen they buy from a queen rearer.
Once the queen returns to her nest, she will have enough stored sperm in her spermatheca to last her for her lifetime, and she will become an egg-laying machine able
14 | A P R AC T I C A L M A N UA L O F B E E K E E P I N G Swarming
The fast and effective passage of these pheromones around the colony is essential to colony stability. If the queen is ageing or has other problems and the strength of her pheromones diminishes, or if the colony becomes so crowded that the message takes longer to get around, then the workers may sense this and start to build new queen cells in preparation for queen renewal. Unless the beekeeper acts decisively, this may lead to swarming, where the old queen and up to half the workers and a few drones depart the colony and start another one elsewhere while the workers in the original colony raise a new queen. Thus where there was one colony there will now be two, with the new young queen getting the best of the deal by retaining the existing nest, stores and brood. This is in effect colony reproduction and is an entirely natural state of affairs, but it does mean that half the beekeeper’s honey-producing livestock flies off and, in all likelihood, becomes someone else’s honey-producing livestock. (Most beekeepers collect swarms that are, in effect, free additions to their livestock numbers.) We deal with swarms and swarm control in more detail in Chapter 6.
Attributes and role
The queen can sting, but her sting lacks an effective barb and its base is well anchored so that she can usually withdraw it safely. She uses her sting only to kill rival queens and would rarely, if ever, sting a human. The queen bee can live for around four years (10 times longer than a worker) unless replaced earlier by the bees or the beekeeper (queen replacement is discussed in
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they age. This substance has been shown to reduce oxidative stress in honey-bees by scavenging free radicals that can lead to ageing or illness – a little like drinking green tea and taking vitamin E pills. As she lays her eggs, the queen measures the size of the cells with her antennae before laying one egg at the base of the cell. If the cell is a ‘worker’-size cell, then the queen will fertilize the egg as it passes out of her and, around 21 days later, one of the most interesting and complex creatures on earth, a worker bee, inheriting genes from both her father and mother, will emerge from the cell.
Duties
The worker is an incomplete female in that she can’t mate and reproduce, but she does do just about everything else and, if you see a honey-bee collecting nectar and pollen from flowers, it will be a worker. Worker bees pass through various task-related phases as they age. Unlike ants, for example, which have task-related castes (such as soldier ants for defence and so on), honey-bee workers engage in defence or other duties at certain ages (see Figure 3).
On emerging from her cell as an adult bee, the worker begins work by cleaning out brood cells and then by capping brood with wax as they enter their pupal stage. She then tends the brood and feeds them and, after that, she engages in such duties as
16 | A P R AC T I C A L M A N UA L O F B E E K E E P I N G . A worker bee’s age-related tasks in the colony
Fig. 3
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The colony can, however, alter this progression of duties if it needs to. If, for example, the colony’s forager bees are killed by pesticides, then younger bees will become foragers sooner and may miss out an intervening stage. On the other hand, if all the younger nurse bees who feed the brood are removed, older forager bees will revert to being nurse bees, and this is no mean feat: their food-producing glands have atrophied by the time they become foragers and have to become active again in order for them to produce brood food. One of the pheromone chemicals that regulates this progression of work is ethyl oleate. Possibly spread around the colony by mouth-to-mouth contact, this pheromone slows down the development of younger bees. Older forager bees carry some 30 times as much of this chemical as younger bees do so, if there are plenty of foragers bringing in the honey, there will be plenty of ethyl oleate in the hive, and this will keep younger bees from developing into foragers. However, should the colony run low on mature foragers (for example, due to spray poisoning), the supply of this grow-slow pheromone will dwindle, and young bees will mature rapidly to fill in the ranks. When foragers again abound, a new abundance of the pheromone will slow the replacement process.
Living in a state of dynamic equilibrium
The whole colony, therefore, lives in a state of dynamic equilibrium, ready to alter or amend its priorities and population ratios at any given time, but only and always for the colony’s benefit and survival. The beekeeper can’t change any of this but can work with the flow by helping to ensure that external factors, such as lack of shelter, starvation,
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Competition from other laying workers is intense, and a clear sign of this laying-worker syndrome is the sight of several eggs in a cell. These eggs will often be placed halfway down the cell due to the shorter length of the worker’s abdomen. If at this stage another queen bee is introduced to the colony, the laying workers will invariably kill her (dealing with this problem is examined in Chapter 8).
The ‘waggle dance’
Bees are such efficient pollinators because, as forager bees, they can communicate the source of food to each other. Immediately on setting up as a colony, scout bees are out looking for the nearest and best sources of nectar and pollen. When they find these, they return to the nest with samples and tell the other foragers about the location and how to get there using a highly symbolic dance language based on movement and sound.
Performing the ‘waggle dance’
What is known as the ‘waggle dance’ has been studied by scientists for decades, and it is generally believed to be the method by which bees tell one another of the location of food and potential new nest sites. The dance takes the form of a figure of eight and is performed by worker bees on the vertical surface of a comb (see Figure 4). The worker moves along a straight line in the figure of eight and waggles from side to side. When this waggle phase is complete, the bee circles to one side and returns to the starting point. This sequence is then often repeated over 100 times, with the direction of the return phase circling alternating each time.
The duration of the waggle phase is correlated to the distance of the food source and
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flight to take and the value of the source, and they also gain a taste of the nectar, which can give them an odour cue.
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Over the succeeding decades, however, von Frisch’s theories were constantly challenged by scientists who believed that the bees found the food by flying downwind of the odour plume and that all that the returning forager imparted was the odour. What was questioned about the Frisch theory was whether bees could decode the dance because scientists did not believe observing bees with such small brains could actually follow the instructions.
New tests carried out at Rothamsted in the UK, however, have shown that von Frisch was right all along. Radar has helped to resolve this long-standing controversy, and the scientists found that the famous waggle dance contains information about the whereabouts of nectar, just as was originally proposed in the 1960s.
Radar tracking effectively proved the bees do follow waggle-dance instructions. The scientists fixed radar transponders to bees who had watched the waggle dance to track their route to the food source, and it was found they flew straight there. To double check, bee recruits were taken to release sites 250 m (820 ft) away from the hive. These bees flew to where the feeding site should have been had they not been displaced, showing they were following the dance instructions accurately. The scientists found that this was very strong supporting evidence for the von Frisch hypothesis because, in this case, there was no possibility the bees were following regular routes or any odours the dancer might have left in the air.
The worker’s lifespan
All in all, a worker bee’s lifespan varies according to the time of the year. During
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who decides which workers will do this and which ones won’t? This is probably where genetic variation comes into play: some workers will be more genetically disposed to carrying out this task than others. Why is this? Remember that the queen mates with many drones, and so one group of workers will be super-sisters derived from one father, all with a particular genetic make-up, while other workers will be from the same queen but another father with a different genetic make-up. Workers from the different genetic groups will have different genetically driven dispositions to carry out the myriad tasks in the colony. There may be many different subfamilies in the colony, and this depends on the number of drones the queen mated with. All the workers therefore will have the same mother, but not necessarily the same father. Research has shown that this genetic variation is vital for the efficient working of the hive and is another reason for the queen to mate with so many drones.
The number of worker bees in a colony will vary throughout the year but, during the height of the active season, will number around 60,000–80,000 or more bees.
If on measuring the size of the cell a queen bee finds that it is a larger drone cell, she will not fertilize the egg as it passes out and, around 24 days later, a drone bee will emerge. Resulting from an unfertilized egg by a process known as parthenogenesis, the drone
22 | A P R AC T I C A L M A N UA L O F B E E K E E P I N G Drones and mating
The drone is optimized for mating and, to do this to best effect, he needs to be able to fly extremely fast (his flight muscles and wing size are larger than worker bees’), to have extremely sharp vision and an extraordinary array of sense organs designed to respond to queen and other drone pheromones over large distances. For example, a queen bee has around 3,000–4,000 eye facets in her compound eye; a worker bee has up to 6,900; but a drone has up to 8,600. A queen bee has some 1,600 antennal plate organs (sensory organs); the worker has around 3,000, and the drone has an amazing 30,000. And it is these receptors that have been studied closely to find out how a drone finds a queen in the air and, sure enough, a research team in the USA has recently identified an odorant receptor that allows male drones to find a queen in flight. The receptor on the male antennae can detect an available queen up to 60 m (195 ft) away. The drone detects the queen substance pheromone, and this is the first time an odorant receptor has been linked to a specific pheromone in honey-bees.
Queen substance pheromone
The ‘queen substance’ (or ‘queen retinue pheromone’) was first identified decades ago, but scientists have only recently begun to understand its structure and role in the hive. This pheromone is a primary source of the queen’s ability to influence behaviour in the hive. It is made up of eight components, one of which – 9-oxo-2-decenoic acid (9- ODA) – attracts the drones during mating flights. (It also draws workers to the queen and retards their reproductive growth, which means that the lack of a queen can lead to the presence of laying workers; we deal with this problem in Chapter 8.)
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sexually mature. He takes mating flights during afternoon periods. Usually drones are pushed out of the hive when there is little forage or when winter approaches and they have no further purpose. Some may survive: I have found drones in hives in mid-winter and I think that those who say that all drones are kicked out as winter approaches have never looked in a hive over this period – for very good reasons.
So who actually controls what goes on in the hive? Which of the three castes of bees gives direction to the whole? Who decides when to send out foragers to concentrate on water collection rather than nectar, for example? Who is the boss?
Decision-making in the colony
For thousands of years decision-making in the colony was thought to be the mandate of the king bee, and the politics of the bee kingdom has been discussed in books and by bee masters for centuries. This bee – which could be seen easily – was thought to direct the total effort by sending out foragers for certain products and sending out his armies for defence when required. In 1609, Charles Butler in England produced his book on bees called The Feminine Monarchie (see Figure 5), in which he recognized that the king was in fact a female and so should be called a queen. Even Butler, however, believed that the bees obeyed this monarch in all things and that the ‘queen’ kept order in the hive by using a whole hierarchy of the nobility and
24 | A P R AC T I C A L M A N UA L O F B E E K E E P I N G by Charles Butler, often
Fig. 5. The Feminine Monarchie
regarded as the father of English beekeeping.
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the species, she doesn’t rule. She doesn’t control. The colony appears to be controlled by what has been called ‘the anonymous consensus of the colony’s workers’. These recent findings could well be of importance to our understanding of the dynamics of all social animals, including ourselves.
Preparing for the birth
When the colony requires a new queen – if, for example, the old one dies or becomes old and ineffective in her laying, or for other reasons that will become clear later on in the book – the workers begin to construct queen cups, which are cells on the surface of the comb but facing vertically downwards. If they proceed with the plan, the queen lays fertilized eggs into the cups (the same as worker eggs), and the creation of a new queen begins. After 16 days, a queen bee emerges from her very distinctive cell.
If allowed to by the worker bees, the new queen kills off potential rival queens still in sealed cells by stinging them through the cell wall, and then she fights any other virgin queens in the hive that have emerged – again, if allowed to by the workers. Worker bees occasionally keep another virgin in readiness in case the first fails to mate, and they will protect this virgin until they have a mated queen.
Queen bee development
The difference between a worker bee and a queen is due solely to the quality and
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the effects of the different feeding patterns are not expressed until the larvae are at least three days old. This whole subject is immensely complex, and this chapter is designed as an introduction only. What you need to remember, though, is that worker and queen bees start out exactly the same and that different nutritional regimes cause them to differ markedly. In effect, all fertilized eggs start out as potential queens. After three days of development a change in diet for the majority of them forms the worker bees. The others remain as queens.
Researching royal jelly
Recent research at the Australian National University may explain why eating royal jelly causes honey-bee larvae to become queens instead of workers. Scientists from the Research School of Biological Sciences at the university have discovered that a copious diet of royal jelly flicks a genetic switch in young bees that determines whether they’ll become a queen or live a life of drudgery. They found that royal jelly seems to modify chemically the bee’s genome by a process called DNA methylation and disrupts the expression of genes that turn young bees into workers. When they ‘silenced’ a gene controlling DNA methylation without recourse to royal jelly, they discovered that the larvae began to develop as queens with the associated fertility, rather than as infertile workers. They believe this is the first time that DNA methylation has been functionally implicated in insects. This molecular process is common in vertebrates – including humans.
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remember, and in Chapter 11 we come back to it when we look at rearing queens. One thing is certain, though, and that is that each time a beekeeper looks into the hive, they should check on the existence of, and health of, the queen.
Finding a new nesting site The queen, worker and drone are, then, the residents in a healthy colony of bees.
When a swarm of bees takes up residence at a site of their choosing, this site has been carefully chosen for certain characteristics. Occasionally, a swarm is unable to find a suitable home and so will end up out in the open where it may prosper for a while until succumbing to cold, wet weather in the winter months or to varroa. Generally, however, a cavity is looked for. This could be a hollow tree, an old chimney, a cavity wall or, on one occasion, the pannier of a motorcycle.
Inspection of bee nests has found that the average nest comprises a cavity of around 40 l (70 pt) capacity, with most being between 20 and 100 l (35 and 175 pt), and these can differ between the different races. Research has shown that the Italian bee prefers a cavity of around 30 l (50 pt), whereas the central European German bee prefers a cavity of 60 l (100 pt). Tropical honey-bees often choose sites outside cavities under branches or overhangs.
The colony will choose a site out of direct exposure to sun, wind and rain with
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nectar and pollen and, very soon, the colony is established with the queen laying eggs, the foragers bringing in food and the house bees maintaining the nest. The colony grows: the bees store food beyond their immediate needs for periods of dearth (such as winter) and, if they have chosen a good site, they will prosper until the varroa mite causes the colony’s death. This is not true of all areas of the world, but in most areas where the western honey-bee lives, varroa will kill the colony if left untreated. They don’t intend to because, if the colony dies, so do the mites, but the varroa mite evolved with the eastern honey-bee, Apis cerana which, having evolved with it, knows how to control it and they can live together. When the western honey-bee (which is hugely superior in honey production) was taken to the Far East and the mite jumped species, the western bee had no defence and, apart from some bees of Russian origin, still hasn’t. So it can be seen that, in nature, until evolutionary pressures cause natural defence mechanisms to develop, the honey-bee cannot currently survive on its own. It needs a beekeeper.
Now that you know that the honey-bee colony is a living, dynamic entity that can be looked upon as a unit of livestock and now that you have an understanding of what those bees are up to and why, it is easier to see where the beekeeper comes in and exactly what their role is when working with bees. Like any other livestock guardian – whether a hobbyist, a research scientist or a commercial farmer – a beekeeper has a responsibility
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The beekeeper’s tasks outlined above are a summary of what you must be able to accomplish if you become a beekeeper. This is not difficult: it is enjoyable and, at the end of the day, seeing everything work out well is immensely satisfying. But to do all this, the beekeeper needs certain items of equipment, knowledge and a plan, and that is just the beginning. Once you start in beekeeping, you will never stop learning. This book will now show you exactly what you need to get started, what you need to know to keep bees successfully, and it will provide you with the plan.
This chapter has discussed the following points:
The colony or beehive should contain a queen bee, worker bees and
drone bees.